It’s been made clear — I’m a pretty weak intellectual. I have the interest, but not the capacity. I can appreciate and be moved by Gershwin or Bach, but throw on some Erroll Garner or The Pixies and my heart sings.
So, I’m not saying I completely believe this, but I found amusing the quote below. It’s from a critique by Joe Queenan of contemporary classical music. It’s tempting to buy into his argument that classical music fans are no more knowledgeable about the form (and perhaps are less so) than pop music fans. I suspect it’s true, but I hesitate because it seems a bit self-serving.
…after attending roughly 1,500 concerts in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Paris, London, Berlin and Sydney, I no longer believe that fans of classical music are especially knowledgeable – certainly not in the way jazz fans are. American audiences, even those that fancy themselves quite in the know, roll over and drool like trained seals in the presence of charismatic hacks phoning in yet another performance of the Emperor Concerto. The public likes its warhorses, but it doesn’t seem to care how well these warhorses get played. They are particularly susceptible to showboaters like Lang Lang and Izzy Perlman and Nigel Kennedy; they turn out in droves to hear Andrea Bocelli warble his way through the Shmaltzmeister’s Songbook. These people may think they care more about music than the kids who listen to hip-hop, but I’ve been eavesdropping on their conversations for 40 years and the results are not impressive. They know that Clair de Lune is prettier than Für Elise, that Mozart died penniless, and that Schumann went nuts. That’s about it.
I thought he was pretty right on, even though I like the occasional piece by Glass, Reich or Adams, but then Terry Teachout offered a rejoinder to Queenan: “If we are to take him literally, everything composed after [1899] belongs in the same garbage can…” I suspect that’s not what Queenan meant, but after re-reading his essay, it’s not clear where Queenan draws the line.
At various points, he seems to suggest it’s between two extremes.
- Music you’ve heard before versus music you’re hearing for the first time
- Composers with familiar biographies full of “romance and drama” versus “Modern composers, their stories largely unknown”
- “brutal, fragmented” “atonal” “harsh, unpleasant, gloomy, post-nuclear” compositions versus (presumably, since he doesn’t say) pleasant and life-affirming melodies
- works by “a truly great composer” versus not-a-great composer
It seems a little like Queenan’s beef is with performance music that’s “discordant” and “abstract,” rather than with music of the 20th & 21st Centuries. In other words, not when the piece was written, but in how it sounds. So, why is “new music” the framing of the argument?
Because, even though he’s suggesting old is better than new, one assumes he’s not rejecting such 20th Century favorites as Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” Satie’s “Gymnopédies,” Holst’s “The Planets,” Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” Prokofiev’s concert fave “Peter and the Wolf,” Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” These are probably exactly the kind of pieces that would be popular with audiences. In part, because of their quality, but also because they’ve heard them before and heard them used in movies and advertisements.
To what extent do today’s listeners treat (so-called) classical music as just popular culture? In other words, a popular composition is a piece familiar from repetitious exposure through the media.